Hi, I've just released this Photoshop compatible plugin (for PC only): Zoom Engine, intended to enlarge digital images. It features a handy interface, many interpolation options (lanczos with any kernel size, customizable bicubic!) including a unique and intelligent new interpolation method CZ2 which allows high quality enlargements, but just judge for yourself and look at the four comparisons examples done between CZ2, Photoshop bicubic, Photozooom and pxl SmartScale available here: http://www.mehdiplugins.com/english/zoomengine.htm

Interpolation of images interests me a lot, as I'm developing a GPU based algorithm for video use. http://audio.rightmark.org/lukin/graphics/resampling.htm shows a nice comparison of types, and I found that the lighthouse test image is great because it's not JPEG compressed. It was hard to see the quality of your algorithm on some of your images due to the JPEG compression artifacts in the original (although it's interesting to see how it coped with them) and I'd also like to see how it works on a pristine, non-JPEG image. But, saying all that, what you're doing looks very good indeed!

Hi Graeme,thanks for your feedbackyes interpolation is a fascinating and endless problems. I guess there's a room for a lot of scientific investigations in that domain. Probably interpolation for video has strong requirements concerning performance.

In attachement lighthouse picture ( i got from Alex Huskin homepage) enlarged 4x times with CZ2. But, don't forget there's a preview in my demo (free of watermarking), so you can get really and idea of what my shareware is able.

Thanks. I think that shows off your scaling well in comparison to other applications and algorithms. Thanks. I don't run a PC, so can't try your demo though, hence my asking for use of your algorithm on that image!

are some of the very early tests on what I'm working on. With video you have to deal with chroma sub-sampling, and interlacing, which can be quite tricky. I've got some very good de-interlace algorithms working, and chroma reconstruction, but I'm finding it hard to get the scaling working on the GPU, but I'm getting there. For video, due to the vast number of frames in a movie, you need to be able to make the algorithm work very much faster than for a still image, which complicates matters somewhat. That, and that whatever you do to the image has to look good across motion!

Hi Graem,it's a pity you cannot test it. But according to my statistics there's a lot of Mac user visiting my website... As if there's were hoping something new for Mac. I'm sorry for them.

My plugin support only upsizing, so here's your cropped image enlarged three times in attachement. Also, there's parameters you can tweak, and i bet there's settings that could better fit to you taste. Enlarged with default settings.

Hopefully Adobe wil adopy a more modern API, especially with the Mac Intel move and make it easier for plugin developers. It would be nice if they'd embrace GPU effects also as they're very fast and all floating point.